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Quire Cleveland: fifteen minutes with new conductor Jay White

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by Daniel Hathaway

Conductor Jay White is leading Quire Cleveland into its second decade this season following the retirement of the professional choir’s founders, Ross W. Duffin and Beverly Simmons. His debut program at St. John’s Cathedral in downtown Cleveland on Friday, November 2 at 7:30 pm is a complex web of music celebrating All Saints and All Souls Days.

White, who toured as a countertenor for eight seasons with Chanticleer, and now serves as professor of voice at Kent State, has put together a program that interleaves Gregorian chants of the Requiem Mass with mass movements by several different Renaissance composers, and memorial motets written in honor of Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, and Tallis. The concert will be repeated on Saturday, November 3 at 7:30 pm at St. Sebastian Church in Akron.

In a telephone conversation from his office at the University, White noted that his long experience as a professional vocalist gave him a lot of repertory to choose from. [Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: Kirill Gerstein talks about Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto  

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by Mike Telin

“I’ve been looking forward to this concert,” pianist Kirill Gerstein said by telephone from his home in Berlin. “This was the piece with which I met The Cleveland Orchestra for the first time at Blossom, and it’s very nice to return with this wonderful concerto and to play it in Severance Hall.”

On Thursday, November 1 at 7:30 pm, Gerstein will perform Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto with The Cleveland Orchestra under the direction of Matthias Pintscher. The concert also includes the complete ballet suite from Béla Bartók’s The Wooden Prince. The program will be repeated on Friday and Saturday at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available online.

Gerstein called the concerto “amazing” and said that while it is famous for its melodic beauty and technical difficulty, its structural inventiveness is often overlooked. “It is incredibly virtuosic, beautiful for the ear, and exciting. But one of the difficulties is that the soloist plays the entire time. There’s also something about needing to play much of it wrapped in what I would call aristocratic elegance, so it’s not just brutal force. While you’re doing all of these challenging things, it still needs to sound elegant.”

[Read more…]

Gregg Kallor’s setting of The Tell-Tale Heart to open Tuesday Musical Fuze Series

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by Jarrett Hoffman

When Halloween is on a Wednesday, it’s only right to celebrate it all week, and on the two weekends that fall on either side. That applies to arts organizations as well: the schedule of the musically spooky continues on Saturday, November 3 at 7:30 pm at E.J. Thomas Hall in Akron, when this year’s Tuesday Musical Fuze Series gets under way.

At the heart of the program is Gregg Kallor’s setting of a classic story which recently turned 175 years old: Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart. (Quick refresher for those with only vague memories of high school: the narrator hears the sound of a beating heart coming from under the floorboards…and it’s the heart of the person they’ve murdered under mysterious, grisly circumstances.)

Kallor will take the keyboard part in the Poe setting, joined by cellist Joshua Roman and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. They’ll mix and match each other throughout the program, which also includes music by Brahms, Schumann, Hugo Wolf, and John Jacob Niles, in addition to further works by Kallor. Tickets are available online.

[Read more…]

Fresh Perspectives launches November 2: a new approach to curating concerts

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by Mike Telin

When I called Devin Hinzo at our appointed time we exchanged hellos: “I was just working on staging a dance for next week’s concert,” he told me. The thing is, Devin Hinzo is an oboist. But he’s also a person who likes all kinds of artistic disciplines and enjoys discovering ways for those disciplines to work together.

On Friday, November 2 Hinzo will launch his Fresh Perspectives series with a program titled “Then & Now: the evolution of tradition, at Lab Studios by Glo, a 5,000-square foot warehouse space in Cleveland’s Superior Arts District. The Art Gallery opens at 6:30 pm with dj white rims. The program, “Then & Now: the evolution of tradition,” featuring music for solo instrument + electronics including a new collaborative work for oboe, hip-hop dancer, and laptop begins at 7:30 pm. For more information visit the Fresh Perspectives Facebook page. A donation of $5 is suggested. RSVP here.

The evening will feature works by composers Brian Raphael Nabors, Elizabeth Hoffman, Carolina Heredia, Ivonne Paredes and J.S. Bach. Performers include Hinzo, hip-hop dancer Ron’dale Simpson, flutist Brittany Trotter, cellist Kellen Degnan, percussionist Torrell Moss, and violinist Julian Maddox. [Read more…]

Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project announces CUSP Concert Series

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by Mike Telin

With the debut of its highly successful Re:Sound New & Experimental Music Festival behind them, the Cleveland Uncommon Sound Project sets its sights on a new endeavor: the free CUSP Concert Series. The inaugural event will be held on Sunday, November 4 at 7:30 pm at the Bop Stop.

“From the beginning we wanted to produce a concert series,” CUSP artistic director Sophie Benn said during a telephone conversation. “The lineup of artists is great, and we are so excited to share this music with the Cleveland community. We want CUSP to engage the community in different ways and this series is another way to do that.”

The concert will feature Nebraska-based tubist, composer, and audio engineer Aaron Hynds, who will perform his own project, Transformer, a large-scale, evolving work for tuba and computer. The work is inspired by the composer’s love of science fiction, and by the realization of the computer as an equal creative entity. [Read more…]

Belgium’s Vox Luminis choir makes third visit to Cleveland

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by Daniel Hathaway

Having on earlier tours performed twice on the Helen D. Schubert Concert Series at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist, Lionel Meunier and his Belgian choir Vox Luminis will open this season’s Cleveland Museum of Art Performing Arts Series at Gartner Auditorium on Wednesday, October 24 at 7:30 pm with an all-Bach program.

ClevelandClassical.com’s Nicholas Jones wrote that on October 31, 2014, Vox Luminis “presented a beautifully crafted program that was at once passionate and serene.” This writer reported that the choir’s April 26, 2017 concert was “flawlessly sung,” “made dramatic use of the cathedral space,” and featured “meticulous tuning and vocal blend” in a program of “sober but exquisitely beautiful music.”

Those earlier programs featured laments (Domenico Scarlatti’s 10-voice Stabat Mater) and funeral music (including Purcell’s musical obsequies for Queen Mary). Sensing that the repertoire might be perceived as a bit dour, Meunier said to the audience in 2017, “I have to confess: we do have happier programs!”

The Belgians will prove that on Wednesday with their concert of five Motets by Johann Sebastian Bach, part of a tour which will include the ensemble’s first Bach performances in the United States (above, rehearsing in Kansas City). [Read more…]

The Cleveland Orchestra: a conversation with Ingo Metzmacher

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by Mike Telin

Good things come to those who wait. And when German conductor Ingo Metzmacher returns to the Severance Hall podium on Thursday, October 25 at 7:30 pm, he will lead The Cleveland Orchestra in a program he has been waiting to conduct for a very long time.

“When we agreed that Christian Tetzlaff would play the Berg Violin Concerto, I thought — here’s my chance,” Metzmacher said during a telephone conversation. “I said, how about combining that with the Webern Passacaglia, which is a wonderful piece, and Schoenberg’s Pelléas and Mélisande after intermission? And they accepted. I’m thrilled because it’s been a dream of mine to combine these pieces into one program.” Metzmacher’s “dream program” will be repeated on Saturday, October 27 at 8:00 pm. Tickets are available online.

While all three works are by composers of the Second Viennese School, a group that comprised Schoenberg along with his students and associates, Metzmacher noted that Pelléas (1903) and the Passacaglia (1908) were both written before those composers had abandoned Romanticism. “They come from before the break so to speak,” he said. “Both pieces end in d minor, so there is a link from the first to the last piece on the program.”

[Read more…]

Baltimore Consort at Holy Trinity, Akron: 15 minutes with Mary Anne Ballard

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by Daniel Hathaway

When the Baltimore Consort presents their program “Adew Dundee: Early and Traditional Music of Scotland” at Akron’s Holy Trinity Lutheran Church on Sunday, October 28 (note date correction!) at 4:00 pm, the ensemble will be revisiting its roots. As violist da gamba Mary Anne Ballard said in a telephone conversation, “Our first recording was of that repertoire. We’ve always been in love with the tunes of Scotland.”

Before that, the Consort was inaugurated by Roger Harmon, who taught guitar at the Peabody Conservatory. “He played a lot of lute music on guitar, and wanted to find ensemble music that involved the lute,” Ballard said. “He found Thomas Morley’s Consort Lessons of 1599, which was written for treble viol, flute or recorder, lute, cittern, pandora, and bass gamba, and formed a similar ensemble in 1979. It’s a wonderful sound to have a melody floating over plucked instruments that underpin the tune with rhythmic chords or running diminutions.”

Beyond the Morley collection, the written repertoire from the turn of the 17th century wasn’t huge. “There are only four main sources from around 1600,” Ballard said, “and we used those as a template for our own arrangements of popular songs and dances — the kind of tunes mentioned in Shakespeare’s plays that most people would have known.”

Thus the genesis of “Adew Dundee,” a group effort for which Ballard served as coordinator. [Read more…]

CityMusic Cleveland kicks off fifteenth season this week

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by Mike Telin

Since its founding in 2004, CityMusic Cleveland has been guided by a simple principle: that classical music should be available to all free of charge. Read a history of the ensemble here. This week the traveling chamber orchestra will kick off its fifteenth season with a program titled “A Bounty of Brahms.” Under the direction of Music Director Avner Dorman, the program includes the composer’s Double Concerto featuring a pair of CityMusic favorites, violinist Tessa Lark and cellist Edward Arron, and the Symphony No. 2.

The run begins on Wednesday, October 24 at 7:30 pm at St. Jerome Church in Collinwood, and continues on to Temple Tifereth-Israel in Beachwood (October 25 at 7:30 pm), St. Noel Church in Willoughby Hills (October 26 at 7:30 pm), and the Shrine Church of St. Stanislaus in Slavic Village (October 27 at 8:00 pm), finishing up at Lakewood Congregational Church on Sunday, October 28 at 5:00 pm. Concerts are free but you’ll want to leave a donation. Click here for further information.

On Sunday, November 4 at 7:00 pm at the Maltz Performing Arts Center, CityMusic will participate in the world premiere of Grammy-winning trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard’s OUR VOICES: DEMOCRACY RE:visited. [Read more…]

CIM New Music Ensemble to celebrate “L’Histoire at 100”
with new film by Kasumi

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by Jarrett Hoffman

There’s nothing quite like Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale. And there will really be nothing like the performance this Friday, October 26 at 8:00 pm in Mixon Hall at the Cleveland Institute of Music.

The conservatory’s New Music Ensemble, directed by Keith Fitch, will celebrate the 100th birthday of that classic work with the premiere of a new film: a commission from Cleveland-based video artist Kasumi, to be played simultaneously with the music. (The concert is free, and will also be live-streamed.)

And if you’re at all familiar with the work of Kasumi, you know you’re in for a fascinating, perhaps harrowing ride.

The trailer gives a taste of her style, in which she splices together images from mid-century B-movies, commercials, and training films from the public domain — images which are “completely direct,” as Kasumi told us during an interview last year. “The acting is so bad and corny that it conveys emotion in shorthand — it becomes a symbol, like a stop sign. If you weave together these tiny gestures, you get all kinds of nuances of emotion.”

[Read more…]

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